A handbook allegedly published by Islamic terror group ISIS condoning the mistreatment of captured women has sent shockwaves through the Western world.
The ‘handbook’, copies of which have surfaced in Iraq, tells followers it is permissible to have sex with prepubescent girls and sell female slaves.
And yet women continue to join the terrorist organisation.
Mass abductions, such as the attack on a Yazidi village in northern Iraq in August 2014, have resulted in the detainment of what Amnesty International believes could be thousands of women and children.
Reports have since surfaced of the women’s fates, which include being sold into sex slavery and forced into marriage.
Iranian-American Middle East expert Haleh Esfandiari said: “To the men of ISIS, women are an inferior race, to be enjoyed for sex and be discarded, or to be sold off as slaves.”
ISIS is promising money and wives to new recruits, but women, including foreigners, are also joining at an alarming rate.
An estimated 300 foreign female recruits from the West have joined ISIS.
Although two all-female battalions were formed in early 2014, the majority of women are not fighting on front lines. Instead, their role is restricted to that of home-maker, encouraging their rebel husbands and providing a hot meal each day.
All that opposed parties can do is plead that the limited amount of power the women possess is not used at the expense of other women.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the fence, a Syrian-Kurdish all-female militia – making up a quarter of the forces fighting against ISIS in northern Syria – has taken up arms and is standing alongside men in a bid to escape inevitable repression in the case of defeat by the rebels.
